I answered: 'Seeing that I could place
confidence in God alone, I retired to the mountains and wilds, to avoid
the society of man; but judge what must be my situation, to be confined
in a stall, in company with wretches who deserve not the name of men.
"To be confined by the feet with friends is better than to walk in a
garden with strangers."' He took compassion on my forlorn condition,
ransomed me from the Franks for ten dinars,[2] and took me with him to
Aleppo.

[2] A dinar is a gold coin, worth about ten shillings of our
money.

"My friend had a daughter, to whom he married me, and he presented me
with a hundred dinars as her dower. After some time my wife unveiled her
disposition, which was ill-tempered, quarrelsome, obstinate, and
abusive; so that the happiness of my life vanished. It has been well
said: 'A bad woman in the house of a virtuous man is hell even in this
world.' Take care how you connect yourself with a bad woman. Save us, O
Lord, from the fiery trial! Once she reproached me, saying: 'Art thou
not the creature whom my father ransomed from captivity amongst the
Franks for ten dinars?' 'Yes,' I answered; 'he redeemed me for ten
dinars, and enslaved me to thee for a hundred.'

"I heard that a man once rescued a sheep from the mouth of a wolf, but
at night drew his knife across its throat. The expiring sheep thus
complained: 'You delivered me from the jaws of a wolf, but in the end I
perceive you have yourself become a wolf to me.'"

Sir Gore Ouseley, in his _Biographical Notices of Persian Poets_, states
that Saadi in the latter part of his life retired to a cell near Shiraz,
where he remained buried in contemplation of the Deity, except when
visited, as was often the case, by princes, nobles, and learned men. It
was the custom of his illustrious visitors to take with them all kinds
of meats, of which, when Saadi and his company had partaken, the shaykh
always put what remained in a basket suspended from his window, that the
poor wood-cutters of Shiraz, who daily passed by his cell, might
occasionally satisfy their hunger.

* * * * *

The writings of Saadi, in prose as well as verse, are numerous; his best
known works being the _Gulistan_, or Rose-Garden, and the _Bustan_, or
Garden of Odours. Among his other compositions are: an essay on Reason
and Love; Advice to Kings; Arabian and Persian idylls, and a book of
elegies, besides a large collection of